Bin Laden was born into a large, extremely wealthy Saudi family. According to Brian Fyfield-Shayler who taught the young Osama English at an elite school in Jeddah, he was taller than his classmates and very good looking.

However he was shy, reserved, too nervous to speak up in class and showed few signs of the extremism that marked his later life.

Other boys would try to convert Mr Fyfield-Shayler to Islam, but he said: "Osama was not one of those, he was not noticeable in his class for his strict religious observance or keenness."

He was happy to learn English - according to his teacher - but unlike many of his half-siblings who were educated abroad and embraced a Western lifestyle, he did not.

Instead Osama stayed in Jeddah where he went to university, to study economics, and first encountered radical Islamic thinkers.

Am I wrong or didn'g Osama study Engineering at King Abdulaziz University?

If so, that would figure. Apparantly, a remarkably high proportion of fundamentalists (of all religions) have a background in the sciences. The theory is that their training does not prepare them for the subtler skills involved in reading between the lines in scripture - or anywhere else. They are trained to see things in black and white, and cannot handle such notions as "allegory" or "myth" and see religious scripture as the literal truth.

They said that Osama studied Economics - but I still have a niggling feeling that he was trained in Engineering.

The programme didn't go into much detail on his childhood and background in Saudi Arabia, which is a pity. However, one "Time" reporter who interviewed him fairly recently remarked about how petty Osama's grudges against his homeland seemed to be. Apparantly, he said things like "This prince is an idiot, this prince slagged meoff once" and so on.